解开远古之谜——活人献祭真实存在！
The priest quickly sliced into the captive's torso and removed his still-beating heart.
祭司迅速将刀插入俘虏的身体，剜走了他还在跳动的心脏。
That sacrifice, one among thousands performed in the sacred city of Tenochtitlan, would feed the gods and ensure the continued existence of the world.
这次献祭，是特诺奇蒂特兰城（墨西哥古都）上千次献祭中的一次，将供奉神灵，并确保现有世界的存续。
Death, however, was just the start of the victim's role in the sacrificial ritual, key to the spiritual world of the Mexica people in the 14th to the 16th centuries.
然而，死亡仅仅是受害者在祭祀仪式中的角色的开端，这对于14到16世纪的墨西哥人的精神世界是尤为关键的。
Priests carried the body to another ritual space, where they laid it face-up.
祭司会带着残余的躯体前往另一个祭所，他们会把尸体面朝上摆放。
Armed with years of practice, detailed anatomical knowledge, and obsidian blades sharper than today's surgical steel, they made an incision in the thin space between two vertebrae in the neck, expertly decapitating the body.
经过多年练习，具备详细的解剖知识，并拥有比今天的外科手术刀还要锋利的黑曜石利刃，祭司们会在两块颈椎之间的狭小缝隙环切，熟练地将头取下。
Using their sharp blades, the priests deftly cut away the skin and muscles of the face, reducing it to a skull.
利用他们手里的尖刀，祭司熟练地剥走面部的皮肤和肌肉，将其变成一个头骨。
Then, they carved large holes in both sides of the skull and slipped it onto a thick wooden post that held other skulls prepared in precisely the same way.
接下来，他们在头骨两侧钻两个大孔，讲它串入一根粗的木柱，木柱上还有很多其他的以同样的方式制成的头骨。
The skulls were bound for Tenochtitlan's tzompantli, an enormous rack of skulls built in front of the Templo Mayor—a pyramid with two temples on top.
这些头骨是为特诺奇蒂特兰成的骷髅头神庙而串的，在这座阿兹特克大庙前有成堆的头骨——这是一座金字塔，上面有两座寺庙。
One was dedicated to the war god, Huitzilopochtli, and the other to the rain god, Tlaloc.
其中一个庙是献给战神，维奇洛波奇特利，另一座献给雨神特拉洛克。
Eventually, after months or years in the sun and rain, a skull would begin to fall to pieces, losing teeth and perhaps even its jaw.
最后，经历长年累月的日晒雨淋，头骨会慢慢变成碎片，牙齿脱落甚至下巴也掉了。
The priests would remove it to be fashioned into a mask and placed in an offering, or use mortar to add it to two towers of skulls that flanked the tzompantli.
祭司会把它取下来装饰成面具用作祭品摆放，或者将其用臼磨碎猴加入大庙侧面的两座头骨塔中。
For the Aztecs—the larger cultural group to which the Mexica belonged—those skulls were the seeds that would ensure the continued existence of humanity.
对于阿兹特克人来说—他们是墨西哥人所属的较大文化群体—那些头骨是确保人类社会延续的种子。
They were a sign of life and regeneration, like the first flowers of spring.
他们象征着生命和繁衍，就像春天的花朵一般。
But the Spanish conquistadors who marched into Tenochtitlan in 1519 saw them differently.
不过在1519年进入特诺奇蒂特兰城的西班牙侵略者们眼里，事情就不同了。
For them, the skulls—and the entire practice of human sacrifice—evinced the Mexica's barbarism and justified laying waste to the city in 1521.
对他们来说，这些头骨—还有整个活人献祭活动—表明了墨西哥人的野蛮并理所当然地在1521年将这座城毁灭了。
The Spanish tore down the Templo Mayor and the tzompantli in front of it, paved over the ruins, and built what would become Mexico City.
西班牙人拆毁了大庙和它前面的骷髅头神庙，铺平了废墟，然后建立了后来的墨西哥城。
And the great rack and towers of skulls passed into the realm of historical mystery.
那些大型的头骨堆和塔变成了远古神秘的传说。
Some conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls.
有的西班牙征服者写道过骷髅头神庙和塔，估计那些头骨堆里包含有130,000个头骨。
But historians and archaeologists knew the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexica culture.
不过史学家和考古学家们清楚侵略者们总是会夸大活人献祭的恐怖来将墨西哥文化妖魔化。
As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether the tzompantli had ever existed.
几个世纪之后，学者们开始怀疑骷髅头神庙是否真的存在过。
Archaeologists at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) here can now say with certainty that it did.
今天国家人类学和历史研究所（INAH）考古学家们可以肯定地说确实是有的了。
Beginning in 2015, they discovered and excavated the remains of the skull rack and one of the towers underneath a colonial period house on the street that runs behind Mexico City's cathedral.
从2015年开始，他们发掘出了头骨堆和一座塔的遗址，遗址位于殖民时期一座房屋下方，房屋位于墨西哥城大教堂后面的一条街上。
(The other tower, they suspect, lies under the cathedral's back courtyard.)
（另一座塔，他们估计，位于大教堂的后院下方。）
The scale of the rack and tower suggests they held thousands of skulls, testimony to an industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world.
头骨堆和塔的规模表明它们含有上千个头骨，这也是史上无与伦比的活人献祭的证明。
Now, archaeologists are beginning to study the skulls in detail, hoping to learn more about Mexica rituals and the postmortem treatment of the bodies of the sacrificed.
如今，考古学家们开始详细研究头骨，希望知道更多关于墨西哥仪式以及献祭用的尸体是如何处理的知识。
The researchers also wonder who the victims were, where they lived, and what their lives were like before they ended up marked for a brutal death at the Templo Mayor.
研究者们还想知道这些受害人是谁，他们住在哪里，在成为大庙前残忍死亡的祭祀品之前他们的生平是怎样的。
"This is a world of information," says archaeologist Raùl Barrera Rodríguez, director of INAH's Urban Archaeology Program and leader of the team that found the tzompantli.
“这是一个信息的世界，”考古学家罗尔.巴雷拉.罗德里格斯说道，他是INAH城市考古项目的负责人也正是他带领的团队发现了骷髅头神庙。
"It's an amazing thing, and just the kind of discovery many of us had hoped for,"
agrees John Verano, a bioarchaeologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, who studies human sacrifice.
“这真是一件神奇的事，也是我们考古人梦寐以求的。”约翰.维莱诺附和道，他是路易斯安那州，新奥尔良的杜兰大学的生物考学家，专门研究活人献祭。
He and other researchers hope the skulls will clarify the role of large-scale human sacrifice in Mexica religion and culture—and whether, as scholars suspect, it played a key part in building their empire.
他和其他的研究者们希望这些头骨能够澄清大规模活人献祭在墨西哥宗教和文化中的作用——以及，是否如学者们猜测的那样，它在建立他们的帝国中也扮演着重要角色。
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